But that had been before the interminable waste of the Grass War and the long train of young women and men in front of my desk with the trinkets they thought would give them a chance of not becoming food for crows in a field somewhere.

The Spinies pressed flutes to their chest-maws and trilled a maniacal improvisation, something like Chinese opera filtered through jazz and spliced with a catfight. Not what I'd call music to die for, but my opinion didn't count much. Customs had generously allowed me to keep my pistol, after draining its battery to red. I had maybe three shots. Worse yet, if I killed someone, that was the end of my journey to sanity. I’d be deported or executed.

Chris Willrich is a former librarian who lives with his family in the otherworldly environs of Silicon Valley. He's best known for his stories about the poet Persimmon Gaunt and the thief Imago Bone, who have appeared in various places including the novelette “The Sword of Loving Kindness” in the very first issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies and the novel The Scroll of Years and its sequels from Pyr. (Two of his other BCS stories, "Shadowdrop” and “How the Wicker Knight Would Not Move,” are set in the same world.) His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and elsewhere, most recently the Gaunt and Bone story “What Lies in Ice” in Tales From the Magician’s Skull.